Sohei Nishino

© Sohei Nishino. Paris, May 2007 - November 2008. Light jet print. 1558×1348 mmThis work by Sohei Nishino comes to us by way of Tim Atherton who alerted us to the wonderfully named Hippolyte Bayard's photography site.

Sohei Nishino walks cities, photographs them and assembles the photos into vast cognitive maps.  He states that this is 'the re-imagined city from my memory as layered icons of the city'.

Spectacularly unsuited to looking at on the screen, they are large, black and white pieces, 4 x 4' more or less.  Knowing the process, one can imagine what they might look like, as unbalanced and as true as all cognitive maps, studded with fragments of startling detail.  

The detail of Istanbul, below,  shows something of the method: like small narratives in the topography of memory complete with sky and ground, some buildings and spaces are made special by their disconnection from the logic of a conventional map.  This is what google maps has liberated us from: the misleading veracity of the aerial view.

© Sohei Nishino. Detail, Istanbul Diorama

Armelie Caron: tout bien rangé

Armelie Caron. New York, tout bien rangé, 2005 / 2008

Armelie Caron, in Anagrammes Graphiques de plans de villes - 2005 / 2008  , takes a figure ground map of a city and classifies all the blocks by size and shape.  Of course Manhattan is numbingly regular, and Berlin has lots of triangular blocks as axes slice through quite regular fabric.  Paris is a surprise, the axes are wider than the blocks, which as a texture are very tiny indeed. 

Re-organising pattern is always quite entertaining, sort of visual puns where a letter is out of place and it throws out a whole new, absurd, meaning.  These city blocks are re-arranged according to visual rules, rather than urban or historical relationships and says quite a lot about the scale of collective life each individual block in each city.  Paris has so many infintesimal blocks, probably the size of one building.  These are the blocks of Kieślowski or early Truffaut where there is a very fine line between apartment and street, where private life is small and public life is all.

Armelie Caron. Paris, tout bien rangé, 2005 / 2008

Green Square

Green Square, Tripoli, Libya. google maps

At the time the google satellite took the picture of Green Square in Tripoli, this week the site of an emergent genocide, it was used as a parking lot.  it is across the street from a vast museum and archaeology complex, on the other side, to the south east is an immense stretch of parks and squares.  Directly south and south west is a bit of city – shops and offices, directly north a large pond, a divided highway and the Mediterranean with a built up edge – all gardens and plaza.

Green Square isn't a place of compression, it leaks all over into adjacent flat spaces.  One can read urban patterns only so far.  Tripoli has an unused traffic circle, it has larger open spaces, it has spaces adjacent to more powerful government buildings than the National Museum, so why Green Square?

Ah, on a tourist site I find (from 2009):  'The square is one of the most important celebration places in Libya.  Muammar Kaddafi addresses his speeches to the nation from here on the most important days such as 1st September Revolution anniversary. . .. Traffic circles the square and it is full of speeding cars day and night.'

So it has been made a potent urban site by association with the reiterated revolutionary origins of Gaddafi who came to power in 1969 with a coup against King Idris.  He was 27, Gaddafi was.

spies

James Hart Dyke. Contact, 2010For the centennial of the British Secret Service, James Hart Dyke was commissioned to shadow MI6 for a year, recording the sense of espionage work.  He is an architect by training, a painter in practice.  After years of watching Spooks in all its precise television definition, these works of Hart Dyke appear as mysterious renderings of banal streets, hotel rooms, landscapes.   The whole series can be seen on his website.

Who knows how many transactions happen on the streets we walk down every day, how many simultaneous lives are being conducted in the cities we take for granted just because we live there.  

Pearl Roundabout, Manãma, Bahrain

Pearl Square, or Pearl Roundabout, or Lulu Square. Manama, Bahrain. photo: google mapsBahrain, a Portuguese colony in the 16th century, then Persian, ruled by the Al-Khalifa family since 1783, independent only since 1971.  Oil is its industry, Manãma its capital with a population of 162,000 in the city, 345,000 in the greater area. 

Now from the google maps images it appears that there is a highway system running through what is a rather small city to equal Toronto's.  Again, as in Cairo, the main area for protest is a huge traffic island, which, when filled with people would halt road traffic at an important nexus. 

Traditional squares were walled by buildings of influence: the church, the state, the security services – the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, for example.  These were the sites of power and thus sites of protest.  These recent uprisings are located in a different political geography; traffic circles, in Manãma's case surrounded by haphazard development.

Manãma also appears to have one of those figurative coastlines that increase ocean frontage.  This isn't the Corniche of Cairo and neither is the violence.

Manama, Bahrain. Google maps

Tahrir Square 2

Aerial photo of Tahrir Square, February 2nd, 2011.

Tahrir Square

Tahrir Square, Cairo. google mapsTahrir Square, not a square, rather a traffic island.   To the north the Egypt Museum, to the east and south what appears to be large international hotels – the Intercontinental and such.  To the northeast, a large empty industrial lot.  Al Tahrir, the road leading to and from the west, becomes the Kasr Al Nile bridge crossing over the Corniche and then the Nile. 
This doesn't appear to be the traditional centre of the city, a formal square tightly surrounded by buildings of state, rather this is much more open, part of a parkway system of roads in the hotel district. 

Just wanted to know where it was all happening in urban pattern terms.  

Yakutsk, Sakha Republic, Russia: 62°N

Yakutsk, Russia. 2010211,000 people, mining centre, cold weather, twinned with Yellowknife.  On the Lena River, a mining town from the late 19th century rapidly developed under Stalin along with the development of forced labour camps in Siberia.  It is the largest city built on permafrost. Looks slick. Evidently that is a new bank building reflecting the northern sky.

We don't have such populations in the Canadian north.  Yellowknife (62°N)has 19,000 people.  Fort McMurray (56°N) has 77,000 and  was a small village until the late 60s when the Suncor plant was built.  Both towns sprawl a bit.  I've had the image, below, of Braatsk for several years and can't remember where I found it, but it shows a city that is significantly urban.  Braatsk is at 56°N, population 260,000, looks like Paris.

Braatsk, Siberia

Diana Thater: Chernobyl

Chernobyl, Production Still; 2010 © Diana Thater; Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth A few more links to Diana Thater's video installation on Chernobyl, showing at Hauser+Wirth, London. 

Her own website: thaterstudio

Which leads you to kickstart, a funding site for the Chernobyl project.

A short interview at dazed digital, which includes these two paragraphs:

Chernobyl is the only post-apocalyptic, or post-human landscape on earth. Today it’s falling into ruins, but it still looks like a city; there’s stores, apartment buildings, schools. And even though it’s completely deserted and falling apart, animals are moving into the city. So, on the one hand you have this perfectly preserved Soviet city from 1970, and on the other hand you have this post-apocalyptic landscape where animals are living.

I think it’s both political and cultural. Chernobyl represents the failure of lots of things – a massive political system, a way of life, of science. Yet even with the human failures, nature continues to persist. Not because it wants or chooses to, but because it must.

OIL: a new town in a resource extraction region

Just a reminder of On Site's exhibition / competition / call for entries for a new town in a resource extraction area. 
We are looking for ideas, ideas, ideas.  There are resource links on the call for entries page for general starting point information, however, you are being asked to figure out what the strategy should be, in 2011, for starting up a new town. 

On the Strand over the weekend there was a piece on video artist Diana Thater's installation on Chernobyl, which was effectively a new city built in the 1970s, something I hadn't realised when it was abandoned just 20 years later.  It is now inhabited by animals, wild horses walk the streets, swans nest on the tailings ponds.  Thater says it is a necessity of nature to persist.  She also talks about what a post-human world looks like, where political systems that built such installations were abandoned along with the site. 

We usually think of designing or planning a new town from point zero, or near to it, that builds into a community with shape and form.  One might also think of the new town when it becomes a discarded post-nuclear installation: what will it say about what we were?

1961, when girls were women

Deutsche Kinemathek. Hansjürgen Pohland, director. 1961click on the image to take you to this delightful, optimistic film of sophisticated urban life in West Germany just 16 years after the end of WWII.  It's an ad, but also a display of moving, definitively, into a future. 

Passeig de Gràcia, 1908

Barcelona en tranvia, 1908. Filmoteca Española

oh for trams, trolleys, street cars.  oh for a slow city.

click on the image above and it will take you to Europa Film Treasures and a short film taken from the front of a tram when the streets were full of children, dogs, people going somewhere.

fences

44 Great Ormond Street, London. 1740Fearsome thickets of iron railings protected houses in the London squares: a precise division between the private and public, the anarchy of the public domain and the owned.  Most of these were taken down in World War II in a drive to collect scrap metal to build tanks.  There is much discussion on WWII forums about whether the railings were ever used: they had a high carbon and sulphur content evidently, and so not that suitable for re-use.  The urban consequences were significant, all those taut blank Georgian façades without their delicate filigreed bases appear quite obdurate.  The six-foot transition between public and private that was negotiated by the railings, now takes place, abruptly, at the door itself.

Typical prairie city streets, even in the early 1980s, were completely fenced.  There was the street, then the boulevard, then the sidewalk, then the fence, then the front yard, then the door.  Calgary pickets in the 1920s and 30s when my fence was built came from the Sarcee Reserve, a three township block of land that runs from southwest Calgary 18 miles deep into the foothills, heavily forested.  Now known as the Tsuu T'ina First Nation they do other things, such as casinos and golf courses.  But earlier they supplied the whole city with firewood and fence pickets. 

Pickets aren't that available anymore.  It is easier to cut them yourself, but not as efficient.  And impossible to get some of the more elegant shapes, curved, punched and notched – doilies for the front edge of the property.  

picket fence culture. 11th Avenue, Southeast Calgary.

garbage cans

It occured to me that we needed a context for Duende's urban fire fountains.  Existing Paris garbage cans clearly discourage fires.

Matthew Blackett wrote a good piece in Spacing about the replacement of the heavy concrete and ceramic tile garbage cans in the Toronto Metro with a similar, transparent solution.  He says it is an anti-terrorism measure: one can see a bomb, whereas before they were hidden.  If they were there. 

Matthew Blackett. Spadina station, Toronto.

Then I found Artemy Lebedev's site: a two-year study of rubbish bins in the public domain, mostly in Russia and eastern Europe.  He writes with that lovely irony of someone who lives in cynical times.  'The function of a trash can is the timely collection of litter that is carelessly thrown in its direction.'

Artemy Lebedev. Movable trash can. MoscowArtemy Lebedev. A trash can that never got scrubbed, Moscow

We have just had enormous black bins with wheels delivered for our household garbage with helpful hints of what to do with our old garbage cans, such as storing sports equipment in them.  I have an aversion to throwing raw rubbish into my new, clean, very shiny garbage bin. It seems somehow slovenly not to have it tidily contained in a black plastic bag.  I would quite like to have that blue Moscow urn as my garbage can: a thing of beauty on the alley.  It just needs a lid.

winter street furniture

Duende Studio and François Bauchet. Fire Fountain, 2010

Duende, a design studio that regularly sends notices of very chic French industrial design, sent this elegant garbage can today.  Acknowledging that people on the street light fires in metal barrels, and often set themselves alight, this is a safe version.  It also aestheticises a social condition that is not always beautiful.

François Bauchet calls it a public fireplace, the winter version of Paris's fountains, an idea first floated by Yves Klein.  I doubt Klein, who died in 1962 at 34, had the homeless in mind, but he had made a conceptual shift from dancing fountains in the public domain to a winter version: both water and fire are elemental, fugitive, ephemeral.  So yes, one can see how Kleinian this lovely garbage can might be.

It is also in the tradition of the Art Nouveau Paris Metro entrances: cast iron and romantic, not a utilitarian atom in their sinuous, gratuitous decorativeness.  Well, other than holding up a sign. 
Should gratuitous beauty be put into service?  Is the issue here safety or the propriety of the street?  The poor are always with us, but at least we can make them look good?
Is it overly presbyterian Canadian of me to think that winter fire fountains casting a sweet wood-smoke pall over the city are a cosmetic device?  Yes, it is, and this is no doubt why our Canadian city streets are so bleak, so unlovely, so un-made up, so un-Parisian.

This is another example of a small thing, like the lipsticks given out during the relief of Belsen, that make a hard life bearable.  Of course we should be solving poverty at a structural level, but we don't seem to be capable of doing that.  In the meantime, might we not acknowledge that the sidewalks are our common ground where all levels of society meet the same amenities? 

Halifax

Here is another example of a settlement carved out of what was perceived to be a fairly hostile and certainly unknown landscape.  Halifax, 1750; a commercial map inviting settlement.   A bit ominous is the large cannon wrapped up in the blue ensign at the top of the cartouche, protecting plucky workers building a wooden building below.  What I've always liked about this map is the precision with which Halifax was laid out: a garrison, all the blocks militarily aligned – an orderliness against the wilderness. 

This block of buildings and roads constitutes central Halifax still; the Grand Parade is as it is shown here.  What doesn't show is that it is all built on a steep hill going down to the water, so each block becomes a terrace. 
Oh well, it is caveat emptor when it comes to maps.  

Bath

Panorama of Bath from Beechen Cliff, 1824, Harvey Wood

In all the lectures I have attended in my life on Bath and Georgian architecture, I have never seen this image.  Bath as we value it developed throughout the 18th century; by time this drawing was made, some of the terraces would have been over a hundred years old, yet how raw it appears.  Nature was clearly to be held at bay, providing a prospect from which one might consider the elegant city.

I once stayed in a bedsitter in Queen's Square (1730, John Wood the Elder, Grade 1 listed buildings); elegant it was not.  Unheated, cold water tap, toilet on the landing, no bath access, dingy and absolutely freezing.  There was an architectural value in the Georgian city, but little social value.  There was still, in the early 1970s, unmended bomb damage from WWII and many of the terraces had been divided into hives of dark low-income bedsits.  This was also just the tail end of the council tower block which looked pretty good in comparison: modern, heated, full of space and light — again, an optimistic but discrepant architectural solution that soon foundered on social realities. 

It is still surprising how quickly Britain shed its social housing programs once the 1980s came and everyone, no matter how impoverished, was encouraged to cut free from the state and to become a property owner.  It took almost thirty years for this political, economic and social project to crash in the sub-prime bubble.  It would be difficult to find anything to rent in Bath today, certainly bedsitters are not considered legitimate housing any more unless as emergency housing for homeless families, and they certainly wouldn't be found in the classic terraces, squares or crescents of Bath.

Mags Harries, Asaroton (Unswept Floor), 1976

Mags Harries. Asaraton (Unswept Floor), 1976. Boston, MassachussettsAsaroton was a public art project by Mags Harries for Massachussetts' bicentennial in the Haymarket in Boston.  Market debris has been cast in bronze and embedded in a crosswalk, part of Boston's Freedom Trail.  'Asaroton' describes Roman scraps of food, long since fossilised.  And then in the title comes (Unswept Floor) with its guilty domesticity.  This piece marks the market and the detritus left on the streets and in the gutters when the market closes.  It valorises the everyday: a crushed cardboard box in bronze becomes a beautiful, abstract thing, without monumentality, something difficult to achieve at the scale of a public art project. 

We have so much monumentality, so much at the large scale, so many broad strokes in our cities.  The public realm, or the fairly meaningless descriptions 'public space' or even worse, 'green space' is not developed from the small detail, the scale of the foot or the hand, but is constructed at the scale of the crane, the flatbed truck, the swipe of brick paving texture on the plan.

One does wonder if civic public art programs which take a percentage of the cost of new developments for sculpture on the street, or on the plaza, or on the plinth are necessary compensations for the lack of the small-scale intimate detail in the modern city.  It isn't about supporting art, as is claimed, but is a deep desire to achieve beauty that in other eras was a component of ordinary civic engineering. 

Historic 18th century Boston is stuffed with beauty; perhaps this is why it understood a project that is so essentially humble and tender. 

Mags Harries. Asaraton (Unswept Floor), 1976. Boston, Massachussets

more sidewalk details

Joseph Clement. New York sidewalk details. Spacing, September 6, 2007Joseph Clement had a great piece in Spacing a couple of years ago on New York's sidewalks.  I found it when I was looking about for the glass block inserts.  He makes the point that when the sidewalk takes the place of a back alley for loading and services it makes for very wide pavements: clearly this proportional difference makes a better ground for pedestrian life.  The flâneur simply couldn't flan on niggardly strips of concrete pressed up against parked cars or downtown traffic. 

The photo above shows the care with which water is conducted away from seams between metal and paving.  Whenever the manhole cover was installed, or the glass lens panel laid, someone was thinking about longevity and the details needed to keep rain water from pooling, from splashing.  Again it is like the design of the cat's eyes where two glass marbles are set in a heavy rubber block which compresses if a car tire runs over it.  In front of the marbles is a small well to collect water, so when the rubber compresses the water rinses the front of the glass marbles keeping them clean.  There is tremendous attention to detail here that goes beyond the ease of installation and is more about imagining the post-installation working life of the product.  What a quaint idea.   

street level

 Victoria Beltrano. Spadina and Dundas, Toronto. February 2010Victoria Beltrano has a good study in On Site 23: small things on the interface between the private building and the public world.  This interface happens at doorways and windows where the street wall of downtown buildings inflect slightly.   She shows one back alley behind a shopping centre appropriated by street traders who use tiny hooks and wires on the otherwise blank wall to hang their stuff on.  Another example is the four-inch ledge on a Shopper's DrugMart window lined with small steel points to keep people from appropriating the ledge to sit on. The third example is a doorway and attached vestibule in Chinatown with a step at the sidewalk that is used as an informal shelter, bus stop waiting area, a place to warm up in the winter. 

The point of the article is the degree of humanity allowed in the urban environment by how the surfaces of buildings at the street level are designed.  Hostile to indifferent to welcoming, much it seems has to do with propriety, possessiveness and sheer good nature.  or not. 

I think we all know how to design a good doorway, or a generous and welcoming window: it isn't our incapacity to make a city beloved; rather it is the citizens themselves who make decisions about children in the city, or the accommodation of the infirm, or buskers, or nomadic marketeers.  Some cities are intolerant.  Some are more easy-going, allowing informal life to happen in all sorts of nooks and crannies, in all sorts of unplanned ways. 

How would we put it to City Hall: we want planning departments and police forces to lighten up?  We want to legislate generosity?  We want a law to make everyone kind?  Yes, sure.